Friday, April 27, 2012

I read a couple of conflicting reviews of the new film "The Raven" this morning in which John Cusack plays Edgar Allen Poe. The film's excuse to depict gruesome murder and high tension detective suspense is to combine such Poe horror tales as "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Premature Burial," etc. with Poe's detective technique of ratiocination. According to the reviews and the trailer on YouTube, Poe is asked to help solve crimes (ala his amateur detective Dupin) in which a killer is imitating murders from his own stories. Not a bad concept, but I will probably wait until it comes out on DVD to watch it. But always alert for a tie-in to my own modest imaginative/ratiocinative efforts, I thought I would post an entry on Poe's detective stories for your reading pleasure, in hopes that you will return to the source and reread Poe.

Although
Edgar Allan Poe's career was relatively short, he was the most important writer
in the mid-19th century to transform the legendary tale form into a
sophisticated psychological fiction now known as the short story. Experimenting
with many different fictional forms such as the gothic tale, science fiction,
occult fantasies, and satire, Poe gained great recognition in the early 1840's
for his creation of a genre that has grown in popularity ever since--the
so-called tale of ratiocination, or detective story, which features an amateur
sleuth who by his superior deductive abilities outsmarts criminals and
outclasses the police.

Such stories as "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The
Mystery of Marie Roget" created a small sensation in America when they
were first published. Following fast upon these works was the "The
Gold-Bug" (1843) which, although it did not feature Dupin, focused on
analytical detection and also was so popular that it was immediately reprinted
three times. "The Purloined Letter," the third and final story in the
Dupin series, has been the subject of a great deal of critical analysis since
its publication as a model of ironic and tightly-structured plot.

Poe is
credited as the creator of the detective story and the character type known as
the amateur sleuth. However, Auguste Dupin and his ratiocinative ability did
not spring from nowhere. Probably the
two most obvious sources are Voltaire's ”Zadig” (1748) and Eugene Francois
Vidocq's ”Memoirs of Vidocq, Principal Agent of the French Police” (1828-29). Poe mentions
Zadig in "Hop-Frog" (1849) and thus probably knew the story of
Zadig's being able to deduce the description of the King's horse and the
Queen's dog by examining tracks left on the ground and
hair left on bushes.He also mentions
Vidocq, the first real-life detective, in "The Murders of the Rue Morgue"
as a "good guesser," but one who could not see clearly because he held the
object of investigation too close.

However,
Poe's creation of the ratiocinative story also derives from broader and more
basic interests and sources. First
there was his interest in the aesthetic theory of Samuel Taylor Coleridge as
derived from 19th-century German Romanticism. In several of Poe's
most famous critical essays, such as his 1842 review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's
”Twice-Told Tales• and his theoretical
articles, "Philosophy of Composition" (1846) and "The Poetic
Principle" (1848), Poe develops his own version of the theory of the art
work as a form in which every single detail contributes
to the overall effect. This organic aesthetic theory obviously contributes much
to Poe's creation of the detective genre in which every detail, even the most
seemingly minor, may be a clue to
the solution of the story's central mystery.

Secondly,
there was Poe's knowledge of the gothic genre, which, based on the concept of
hidden sin and filled with mysterious and unexplained events, had, like the
detective story, to move inexorably toward a denouement that would explain or
lay bare all the previous puzzles. The
first Gothic story, Horace Walpole's ”The Castle of Otranto” (1764), with its
secret guilt and cryptic
clues, was thus an early source of the detective story.

Thirdly,
there was Poe's fascination with cryptograms, riddles, codes, and other
conundrums and puzzles. In an article in a weekly magazine in 1839, he offered
to solve any and all cryptograms submitted; in a follow-up article in 1841 he
said that he had indeed solved most of them.
Although Poe demonstrated his skill as a solver of puzzles in many
magazine articles, the most famous fictional depiction of his skill as a
cryptographer is his story "The Gold Bug" (1843).

William
Legrand, the central character in "The Gold Bug," shares some
characteristics with Poe's famous amateur sleuth, Auguste Dupin: he is of an
illustrious family, but because of financial misfortunes he has been reduced to
near poverty; although he is of French ancestry from New Orleans, he lives
alone on an island near Charleston, South Carolina; moreover, like Dupin, he
alternates between gloomy melancholy and excited enthusiasm, which leads the
narrator (also like the narrator in the Dupin stories) to suspect that he is
the victim of a species of madness.

However, it
is in the Auguste Dupin stories that Poe develops most of the conventions of
the detective story which have been used by other writers ever since. The first
of the three, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," is the most popular
because it combines horrifying inexplicable events with astonishing feats of
deductive reasoning. The narrator, the
forerunner of Dr. Watson of the Sherlock Holmes stories, meets Dupin in this
story and very early recognizes that he has a double
personality, a Bi-Part Soul, for he is both wildly imaginative and coldly
analytical.

The reader's
first encounter with Dupin's deductive ability takes place even before the
murders occur when he seems to read his companion's mind by responding to
something that the narrator had only been thinking. When Dupin explains the elaborate method whereby he followed the narrator's
thought processes by noticing small details and associating them, we have
thebeginning of a long history of
fictional detectives taking great pleasure in recounting the means by which
they solved a hidden mystery.

Dupin's
knowledge of the brutal murder of a mother and daughter on the Rue Morgue is by
the same means that any ordinary citizen might know of a murder--the
newspapers. As is to become usual in the
amateur sleuth genre, Dupin scorns the methods of the professional
investigators as being no method at all. He argues that the police find the
mystery insoluble for the very reason that it should be regarded as easy to
solve, that is, its bizarre nature; thus the facility with which he solves the
case is in direct proportion to its apparent insolubility by the police.

The heart of
the story, as it is to become the heart of practically every detective story
since, centers not on the action of the crime but rather on Dupin's extended
explanation of how he solved it. The points about the murder which stump the
police are precisely those which enable Dupin to master the case: the
contradiction of several neighbors who describe hearing a voice in several
different foreign languages and the fact that there seems no possible means of
entering or exiting the room where the murders took place. The first he accounts for by deducing that
the criminal must have been an animal; the second he explains by following a
mode of reasoning based on a process of elimination to determine that apparent
impossibilities are in reality possible after all. When Dupin reveals that an
escaped Ourang-Outang did the killing, the Paris Prefect of Police complains
that Dupin should mind his own business.
However, Dupin is content to have beaten the Prefect in his own realm;
descendants of Dupin have been beating police inspectors ever since.

"The
Mystery of Marie Roget," although it also focuses on Dupin's solving of a
crime primarily from newspaper reports, is actually based on the murder of a
young girl, Mary Cecilia Rogers, near New York city. Because the crime had not been solved when Poe wrote the story,
he made use of the actual facts of the case of Mary Rogers to tell a story of
the murder of a young Parisian girl, Marie Roget, as a means of demonstrating
his superior deductive ability.

The story
ostensibly begins two years after the events of "The Murders in the Rue
Morgue" when the Prefect of Police, having failed to solve the Marie Roget
case himself, worries about his reputation and comes to Dupin to ask for his
help.Dupin's method is the classic
means of the armchair detective; he gathers all the copies of the newspapers
which have accounts of the crime and sets about methodically examining each
one.He declares the case more
intricate than that of the Rue Morgue because, ironically, it seems so
simple.

One of the
characteristics of the story that makes it less popular than the other two
Dupin tales is the extensive analysis of the newspaper articles Dupin engages
in--an analysis which makes the story read more like an article critical of
newspaper techniques than a narrative story.In fact, that which makes Poe able to propose a solution to the crime is
not so much his knowledge of crime as it is his knowledge of the conventions of
newspaper writing.In a similar manner,
it was his knowledge of the conventions of novel-writing that made it possible
for him to deduce the correct conclusion of Dickens' novel Barnaby Rudge
the previous year when he had read only one or two of the first
installments.

Another
aspect of "The Mystery of Marie Roget" which reflects Dupin's
deductive genius and which has been used by detective writers since is his
conviction that the usual error of the police is to pay so much attention to
the immediate events that they ignore the peripheral, that is, the
circumstantial, evidence. Both
experience and true philosophy, says Dupin, show that truth arises more often
from the seemingly irrelevant than from the so-called strictly relevant. By this means, Dupin eliminates the various
hypotheses for the crime proposed by the newspapers and proposes his own
hypothesis which is confirmed by the confession of the murderer.

Although
"The Mystery of Marie Roget" contains some of the primary conventions
that find their way into subsequent detective stories, it is the least popular
of the Dupin narratives not only because it
contains so much reasoning and exposition that very little narrative emerges,
but because it is so long and convoluted that the reader tires of following the
many details ofDupin's analyses of the
newspaper articles. Of the many experts of detective fiction who have commented
on Poe's contribution to the genre, only Dorothy Sayers has praised the
"Marie Roget" work, calling it a story especially for connoisseurs, a
serious intellectual exercise rather than a sensational thriller like "The
Murders in the Rue Morgue.

However,
professional literary critics, if not professional detective writers, have
singled out "The Purloined Letter"—the most ironic, economical, and
classically pure of the Dupin stories--as the most brilliant of Poe's
ratiocinative works. This time the crime is much more subtle than murder, for
it focuses on political intrigue and manipulation. Although the crime is quite simple--the theft of a letter from an
exalted and noble personage--its effects are quite complex. The story depends on several ironies: first of all, the identity of the criminal
is known, for he stole the letter in plain sight of the noble lady; second, the
letter is a threat to the lady from whom he stole it only as long as he does nothing
with it; finally, the Paris Police cannot find the letter, even though they use
the most sophisticated an exhaustive methods of searching for it, precisely
because, as Dupin deduces, it is in plain sight.

Also
distinguishing the story from the other two Dupin stories is Dupin's extended
discussion of the important relationship between the seemingly disparate
talents of the mathematician and the poet.
The Minister who has stolen the letter is successful, says Dupin,
because he indeed is both poet and mathematician. In turn, Dupin's method of discovering the location of the
letter, a method which has been used by detectives ever since, is also to be
poet and mathematician and thus to identify with the mind of the criminal. The method follows the same principle as
that of a young boy Dupin knows of who is an expert of the game of "even
and od,--a variation of the old game of holding something in your hand behind
your back and asking someone to guess which hand holds the prize. The boy always wins, not because he is a
good guesser, but because, as he says, he fashions the expression on his face
to match the face of the one with his hands behind his back and then tries to
see what thoughts come into his mind to correspond with that expression.

The various
techniques of deduction developed by Poe in the Dupin stories are so familiar
to readers of detective fiction that to read the Poe stories is to be reminded
that very few essential conventions of the genre have been invented since Poe.
Indeed, with the publication of the Dupin stories, Poe truly can be said to
have singlehandedly brought the literary genre of the detective story into
being.

1 comment:

I found this article really interesting. For English I studied The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the Red-Headed League and Edgar Allen Poe's Professer Dupin was a big influence on Arthur Conan Doyle's short stories.

Reality of Artifice

New Short Story Theories

Followers

About Me

Born and raised in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. Received B.A. from Morehead State University in 1963; M.A. from Ohio University in 1964; Ph.D. from Ohio University in 1966. Taught at California State University, Long Beach from 1967 to 2007. Retired and currently writing and blogging.

Dubliners Centenial

One hundred years ago, the great collection of stories Dubliners by James Joyce appeared. If you are interested in my comments on that collection, see my posts in April 2012 when the book was featured in Dublin's "One City, One Book."